The word 'playacting' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe someone pretending to be someone else or something different than their true self. For example, "The actor failed to capture the real essence of the character, resorting to obvious playacting instead."
Playacting depends on conventions, which must be understood in their historical context.
Members of the training staff create a situation by playacting, and the trainees either comment on what is taking place or participate in the attempt to find a solution, or they perform functions or services in conditions that simulate their working environment.
She says that the Vineyarders know that their "faith practice" — their date nights with God, their asking him for a red convertible — is, in some measure, playacting.
They have thrift-shop Victorian wardrobes to die for, and their dress-up games and intricately scripted and staged playacting (done for their own pleasure, without spectators — except for Halloween) seem at one with the film's Portland setting.
Still, how good the play was: glowing quick connecting, with zero cheap opera buffa playacting.
The work's material shabbiness and playacting artificiality intensified the effect, roping me into complicity with the artist's intention as efficiently as a halcyon film by Godard.
It's a beautiful kind of emotional nakedness — ingenuously exposing the sheer love of playacting — that most actors lose long before they become "professional".
An article in today's New York Times suggested that American soccer players are particularly poor at playacting, although it managed to quote only the opinions of American players.
"I thought it was playacting; it was preposterous and silly," he recalled.
And if he asked what was wrong with her I wasn't going to equivocate because equivocation — any kind of uncertainty, a tremor in the voice, a tonal shift, playacting — is the surest lie detector.
His boozing and coke-snorting were certainly addictions, but perhaps they were merely the solvents needed to maintain the larger, primal addiction to joking and playacting.
